One of Europe's most outspoken columnists -- and the winner of the prestigious Orwell Prize for journalism -- has the guts to say what few others will

Please use our various "share" features to help make this SUPERB! article go viral

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed
to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding
several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had
murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who
targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now
Cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared
links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past.
Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for
attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly
declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of
rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear
out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai
massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox
Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most
important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets
around the world. Oh  and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya
because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate
to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is
confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not
entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might
have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they
were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic
terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing
the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female
journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against
diversity’. As blogger Edgar Davidson
observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in
France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and
she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had
introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the
west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they
also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was

‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French
military postings overseas.’

RECEIVE LIBERTY LOVING COLUMNISTS IN YOUR INBOX … FOR FREE!

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily update. It's free. Just click here.

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted
by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers
in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations
against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which it undertakes solely to protect its own
people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child
casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product
of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children
in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill
Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting
their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do
western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic
terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves
pump out precisely the same lies and incitement  and then suggest that the
deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by
Israel to prevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness
Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths
of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the
EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all
violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by
underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady
Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself. And now
Hamas itself, no less, has sprung
to her defence:

‘“Ashton’s declarations are worthy of appreciation and
support due to Israel’s attempts to pressure her,” said a senior Hamas
official, Izzat al-Rishq, on his Facebook page.’

‘No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would
not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that
history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the
dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From
there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be
justified.’

The terrorist who carried out the French killings may now
have been caught. But those in the west who provide an echo chamber for the
diabolical discourse that incubates genocide have yet to be brought to account.

JWR contributor Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author of, most recently, Londonistan. She is best known for her controversial column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996.

Adapted from an address to Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media, 30 December 2010.